Together, the Mnuchins created and owned the luxurious Mayflower Inn & Spa in arguably the most sophisticated of the affluent towns in Connecticut’s Litchfield Hills, Washington. (The Mayflower, under the latest owner after the Mnuchins sold it, is now The Mayflower Grace.)

Hedley, who once owned a Connecticut mecca for film lovers, the independent Bantam Cinema in Litchfield, launched the spa at the Mayflower and continued to oversee the sybaritic retreat for a time after the family sold the Downton Abbey-esque country house hotel that attracts folks like the Clintons.

The Hedleys have a home high on a hilltop in Washington, but they are currently living Palm Beach, Fla.

Pretty luxe life, right?

It would be foolish to argue otherwise—at least when that life is viewed on a surface level—but withhold any judgment that may be skipping across your synapses and rising to your lips.

Hedley has known the weight of life’s realities far more than her narrative suggests, and the fuller picture reveals her—the emblems of privilege aside—as one of the good guys.

That documentary made with powerful friends and nominated for the genre’s most prestigious award—it was entitled “Dwarfs: Not a Fairy Tale,” and it springs directly from the Hedleys’ own life, from her daughter, LilyClaire.

"We think she has achondroplasia, a form of dwarfism," the doctor said without actually meeting my eye.

The Hedleys are living in Florida at the moment, rather than Connecticut, or Manhattan, because that’s where LilyClaire, now 18, had be for necessary surgeries, which has meant their 10-year-old daughter is in school there.

“We’re going to stick around for a while for her sake,” Hedley explains on the phone of her youngest daughter.

The Hedleys have four children in all, including two sons, and while many moms with means might be content to consider not-insubstantial family issues a full agenda, Hedley is too empowered and determined to change the lives of those around her for the better.

“We are mothers who came together to make a difference,” they say on the website. “We met over a chance meeting and subsequent conversations about raising children of difference. We shared our stories as parents, laughed and cried together over the challenges and victories, the limitations and ultimately the possibilities these children face particularly as they head towards adult independence. It seemed clear to us that there ought to be a way to create a community in which the young people themselves could share their stories, narratives, experiences with one another.”

“It’s just getting started,” Hedley says on the phone, referencing stories posted about a cancer survivor and someone dealing with hemophilia. In telling these stories and others, the interactive website is designed “to inspire conversation, de-stigmatize and promote genuine understanding. This is an initiative: a step towards stripping away judgment and critique and a step towards developing true empathy.”

“There’s a real need,” Hedley says, mentioning an effort in the works to craft a “differences” curricula for schools.

The Difference Diaries is a philanthropic endeavor at the vanguard of human, civil and personal rights as they apply to the growing spectrum of 21st-century manifestations of identities—statuses that once seemed to make a person “different” but are increasingly perceived as what they always have been, which is simply other shades of normal.

If the "Diaries" effort is akin to a newborn, then Hedley’s other primary focus is still in its infancy.

It’s the multifaceted blog Lah Life, which also offers an online shop and menu of services, altogether providing a “non-nirvana, sensible person’s guide to living healthy, living luxe and living well.”